Re: Non-greedy matching (S-flag) behaving weird

[Sebastian Gniazdowski <sgniazdowski@gmail.com>]

On 8 June 2018 at 10:15, Peter Stephenson <p.stephenson@samsung.com> wrote:
> You've got a "*" at the beginning and the end  They're both doing
> matching --- they're is no single "matching" to which a rule applies ,
> there are just separate patterns all attempting to match.  You're going
> to have to work out some way of forcing one of them to match more than
> the other.

You are apparently right, but it is a big surprise to me. * matching
over what (a|b) should match, on string xxxaxxxb?? Well, this test
works like I would expect:

~ buf='xxxaxxxbxxx'; print "${(S)buf/(#b)(*)(a|b)(*)/R}"
Rxxxbxxx

With greedy search (no (S)-flag):

~ buf='xxxaxxxbxxx'; print "${buf/(#b)(*)(a|b)(*)/R}"
R

However, I also tested vim, entering text:

abcd BEGIN efgh END ijkl

And then running matching with regex: .\{-}\(BEGIN\|END\).\{-}

\{-} is non-greedy match. YET, this matched till END, not till BEGIN.
Very weird.

-- 
Best regards,
Sebastian Gniazdowski